East London

by Walter Besant

Here is another story about Ratcliffe. In a street by the river, beside the stairs, are two or three big ruinous warehouses, mostly deserted. One of these has a double front, the left side representing a private house, the right a warehouse. What was stored in the warehouse I know not; the whole riverside is lined with warehouses and stores. The place is now for a third time deserted, and stands with broken windows. It has been deserted, so far as the original purpose was concerned, for many years. Some thirty years ago a young medical man began to live and to practise in Ratcliffe. He became presently aware that the death-rate among the children was frightful. There was no hospital nearer than the London Hospital in the Whitechapel Road, and that was two miles away; there were no nurses to be obtained and there were no appliances; if a child was taken ill it had to lie in the one room occupied by the whole family, without ventilation, without proper food, without skilled care, without medicines. Therefore in most cases of illness the child died.

He found this rickety old warehouse empty; he thought that he would do what he could, being quite a poor man, to make a hospital for children. He did so; with his slender funds he got a few beds and quickly filled them. He was physician, surgeon, dispenser, druggist, everything; his wife was nurse and everything else. Together these two devoted people started their hospital. Well, it grew; it became known; money began to come in; other doctors and nurses were taken on; all the rooms, there were many, were filled; the children began to recover. Presently the house became so prosperous that it was resolved to build a separate Children’s Hospital, which was done, and you may see it—a noble place. But for the founder this crown of his labors came too late. The work killed him before the new hospital was completed; one of the wards, the Heckford Ward, is named after the man who gave all his strength, all his mind, all his knowledge, all his thoughts; who gave his life and his death; who gave himself, wholly and ungrudgingly, to the children. His patients recovered, but their physician died. He gave his own life to stay the hand of death.

Then the house stood empty for a time; it was presently taken over by the vicar of the parish and made into a playhouse for the little children in the winter after school hours, from four to seven; I have told you how the children swarm in the Ratcliffe streets. After seven the house was converted into a club for the rough riverside lads, where they could box and play single stick and subdue the devil in them, and so presently could sit down and play games and listen to reading and keep out of mischief. But the house is condemned; it is really too ramshackle; it is empty again, and is now to be pulled down.

There is still another story whose scene is laid at Ratcliffe. There is a house beside the church which is now the vicarage. It is a square, solid house, built about the end of the seventeenth century. It is remarkable for a dining-room whose walls are painted with Italian landscapes. The story is that there lived here, early in the eighteenth century, a merchant who rode into London every day, leaving his only daughter behind. He desired to decorate his house with wall-paintings, and engaged a young Italian to stay in the house and to paint all day. Presently he made the not unusual discovery that the Italian and his daughter had fallen in love with each other. He knew what was due to his position as a City merchant, and did what was proper for the occasion—that is to say, he ordered the young man to get out of the house in half an hour. The artist obeyed, so far as to mount the stairs to his own room. Here, however, he stopped, and when the angry parent climbed the stairs after the expiration of the half hour to know why he was not gone, he found the young lover, dead, hanging to the canopy of the bed. His ghost was long believed to haunt the house, and was only finally laid, after troops of servants had fled shrieking, when the wife of the vicar sat up all night by herself in the haunted chamber, and testified that she had neither seen nor heard anything, and was quite willing to sleep in the room. That disgusted the ghost, who went away of his own accord. I wish I could show you one room in the house. It was the old powdering-room. When your wig had been properly curled and combed you threw a towel or dressing-gown over your shoulders and sat in this little room, with your back to the door. Now, the door had a sliding panel, and the barber on the other side was provided with the instrument which blew the white powder through the panel upon the wig. The operation finished, you arose, slipped off the dressing-gown and descended to your coach with all the dignity of a gold-laced hat, a wig white as the driven snow, lace ruffles, a lace tie, and a black velvet coat—if you were a merchant—with gold buttons, and white silk stockings. A beautiful time it was for those who could afford the dignity and the splendor which made it beautiful. For those who could not— Humph! Not quite so beautiful a time.

After Ratcliffe we pass into Limehouse. It was at Limehouse Hole that Rogue Riderhood lived.

The place is more marine than Wapping; the public houses have a look, an air, a something that suggests the sea; the shops are conducted for the wants of the merchantmen; the houses are old and picturesquely dirty; the streets are narrow; one may walk about these streets for a whole afternoon, and find something to observe in every one, either a shop full of queer things or a public house full of strange men, or a house that speaks of other days—of crimps, for instance, and of press gangs, and of encounters in the streets; there are ancient docks used for the repair of wooden sailing ships; there are places where they build barges; a little inland you may see the famous church of Limehouse, with its lofty steeple; it was only built in 1730. Before that time there was no church at Limehouse; since that time nobody has gone to church at Limehouse, speaking of the true natives, the riverside folk, not of those who dwell respectably in the West India Dock Road. It is, however, doubtless a great advantage and benefit to a sea-going population to have a churchyard to be buried in.

Limehouse Basin and Church.

At Limehouse the river suddenly bends to the south, and then again to the north, making a loop within which lies a peninsula. This is a very curious place. It occupies an area of a mile and a half from north to south, and about a mile from east to west. The place was formerly a dead level, lower than the river at high tide, and therefore a broad tidal marsh; it was, in fact, part of the vast marsh of which I have already spoken, now reclaimed, lying along the north bank of the river. This marsh was dotted over with little eyots or islets, sometimes swept away by the tide, then forming again, composed of rushes, living and dead, the rank grasses of the marsh, and sticks and string and leaves carried among the reeds to form a convenient and secure place where the wild birds could make their nests. When the river wall was built the marsh became a broad field of rich pasture, in which sheep were believed to fatten better than in any other part of England. Until recently it had no inhabitants; probably the air at night was malarious, and the sheep wanted no one to look after them; the river wall was adorned with half a dozen windmills; dead men, hanging in chains, preached silent sermons by their dolorous example to the sailors of the passing craft; there was instituted at some time or other before the seventeenth century a ferry between its southern point and Greenwich, a road to meet the ferry running north through the island. Pepys crossed once by this ferry in order to attend a wedding. It was in the plague year, when one would have thought weddings were not common and wedding festivities dangerous things. But there was still marrying and giving in marriage. He was with Sir George and Lady Carteret; they got across from Deptford in a boat, but found that their coach, which ought to have met them, had not come over by ferry, the tide having fallen too low. “I being in my new colored silk suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons and gold broad-lace round my hands, very rich and fine, ... so we were fain to stay there in the unlucky Isle of Dogs, in a chill place, the morning cool, the wind fresh, to our great discontent.” Why does he call the Isle of Dogs unlucky?

In the middle of the island stood, all by itself, a little chapel. Nothing is known about its origin. I am inclined to think that, like many other chapels built on this river wall, on town walls, and on bridges, it was intended to protect the wall by prayers and masses, sung or said “with intention.” We have already found a hermitage by, or on, the wall at Wapping, another place of prayer for the maintenance of this important work.